Random Instruction Testing For Function Verification Of High Performance Embedded Processor

With the advancement of VLSI design and the scaling of technology, the number of high performance processor is surging. Not only does the performance of the processors is scaling up complying with the Moore's Law, but also the processors are get widely adopted in all kinds of application systems. Embedded processor is becoming indispensable to today's revolution of information technology, which can be widely found in all kinds of communication equipment, network equipment, vehicles, and even weapons. On the other hand, the progressing of processors is bringing much trouble to the processor's functional verification, which nowadays consuming more than 70% of processor design's workload and resources, and there is no indication the percentage stops uprising. Therefore, verification is becoming a bottleneck to today's design of high performance embedded processors. It has been an exigent task to reduce the difficulty of functional verification, cutting down the ratio of verification in the whole design duration, while assuring the coverage of functional verification when designing a high performance processorTo solve this problem ,the concept of random instruction testing has been introduced here .Thus not only a lot of verification engineers' burdens of hand writing test is reduced ,but also the influence of man-made factor in the process of testing. In the checking process of embedded processor, random instruction testing plays an important role to reduce the design period of processor.This Paper introduces 32-bit high-performance embedded processor. During the developing of CK520 embedded processor, two methods for function test are presented, static random instruction test and dynamic random instruction test. The fundamental and working process are introduced, and their advantage and disadvantage are also analyzed in this paper. At last, it provides the real test result. All result data indicate that random test can play a very valid role in function verification of embedded processor.